Science rules in digital marketing.

Social media is a place of vanity. Those of us who use social media often get to see flattering images of just about everything - people, places, food, cars, whatever. Have you ever seen a picture of a friend posted as their new profile picture and thought, "Wow, that's a good picture of them."

One might believe that the same holds true for automotive ads. On websites, it has been widely accepted that real pictures of inventory work better than stock photos, but on social media we have access to the gorgeous pictures that are supplied by the OEMs. Will pretty advertising pictures outperform pictures of live inventory on ads that are sending traffic to the vehicle details pages and search results pages?

We have done a ton of A/B testing over the past few months and we have pretty compelling data, but I want to get the opinion of the community here before posting those results. What do you think?

Here are some of the criteria for a test we ran for a Hyundai client:

• All ad copy had the same titles, status text, and link description
• The ads linked to the search results page for new Hyundai vehicles
• They were targeted at intenders - people within driving distance to the dealership who had indicated they intend to buy a new Hyundai in the next 180 days
• The only difference was the image

We ran two concurrent campaigns for 1 month. One had beautiful images pulled from the OEM. The other had live inventory images. Here are samples with the branding omitted:

Which type do you think got more clicks to the dealer's website?

Take your pointer finger and your thumb and spread them out as far as you can. That represents the gap between good and great when it comes to most automotive digital marketing practices such as SEO. Now, take you arms and spread them as wide as you like the image above. That represents the gap between really good automotive social media and great social media.

If we tried to demonstrate simple "good" instead of very good, the gap would be wider than Shaquille O'Neal's wingspan and "good" is where a good portion of today's car dealers are today with their social media. It's a dramatic improvement from just a couple of years ago, but there's a long way to go.

Keep in mind that this is not a completely biased opinion. My company does SEO and we'll readily admit that having a good presence through SEO is not very far off from having a great one. With social media, the differences are exceptionally clear.

Good social media means having a strong presence. Posting on Facebook several times a week, keeping it relevant to the dealership and the local community, participating in meaningful communication, perhaps throwing a little money at it - these are the things that make for a good social media presence.

To be great, you should be taking advantage of the immense amount of data that social medai sites give us and then properly target the exact right messages to them in order to bring people to your website and to drive shoppers to your showroom floor. The biggest challenge is that so few are truly taking advantage of the medium in a great way that for many, it's simply a mythical beast. Many have tried social media vendors, hiring social media specialists, or putting a good amount of effort into social media without seeing a meaningful return on investment.

It's out there. We've seen it. Great social media that actually drives business is not a myth. It's really not even that hard to find. Unfortunately, it's much easier to find poor practices or bad strategies that are allegedly supposed to be good that it has made many dealers lose faith.

The same was true about SEO a few years ago. Dealers were thinking they were getting great SEO, only to find out that the methods being sold to them were little more than fancy reporting and technobabble designed to keep the $500 invoices paid for as long as possible. Today, more dealers are able to recognize bad SEO, good SEO, and great SEO, which is why the gap between them is tightening. "Good" is judged on a sliding scale and as more dealers and vendors get better, the bar is raised.

This should be happening very soon with social media. That's our hope. As more dealers move forward with their social media practices, hearing of things that really work and trying them at their dealership, it's likely that the bar will be raised for social just as it has been with SEO. The gap is wide today, but in the future it will be narrowing. That is when those who started early at doing the right things or working with the right people will truly see the benefits of their decisions.

Who at Driving Sales has seen something extraordinary? Something great? Something that's much better than good? Please post your experiences in the comment section below.

A good social media advertising campaign (or any marketing campaign at all, for that matter) should be guided by science. Testing, monitoring, adjusting, and testing again are the cornerstones of a good marketing strategy.

Much of what we do in the car business comes with assumptions. We do things that we have known from past experience to be successful. Sometimes, we have to take those assumptions and adjust them to modern sentiment, trends, and technologies. Other times we have to take those assumptions and throw them out the window.

Below are 6 images. These images were built to plug into a single Facebook advertising campaign designed to drive traffic to the website. The wording of the ad was the same across the board. The budget was a strong one and the activity was left in the hands of the Facebook algorithm to serve the ads based upon activity and popularity.

Look at the images and come to a conclusion in your mind which one yielded the most clicks to the website. The orange section represents where the logo is. Keep in mind that the wording of the ad was generally geared towards Chevrolet - no model indicators were used in the ad other than the image. Given this limited amount of information, which do you think performed the best and yielded the most clicks to the inventory for the dealership?

1. Red Camaro

2. Tahoe

3. Black Camaro

4. Keys

5. Silverado

6. Corvette

Think you have the right answer? I'll tell you up front - it wasn't even close. The ad that performed the best had more than double the click-thru rate in the first few hours. After it started going, it ended up with more than 3 times the clicks of all of the other images combined.

If you have an answer, like this post and comment with which one you think performed the best in the ads. One name will be drawn from the correct answers before the end of the month. If you're a dealer, you'll get a cool prize in the form of some sort of service from Dealer Authority. If you're a vendor, we'll reward you with a contextual followed link to your website from a PageRank 5 site (great for SEO, and if a dealer wins and would prefer that, they can take it instead).

Who's up for the challenge?

Dealertrack Technologies, a leading provider of financial services software to auto dealers, has agreed to purchase digital-marketing newcomer Dealer Authority for about $1 billion.

The deal will not be finalized until it goes through regulatory approval and is expected to be complete by the end of 2nd quarter, 2014. Around half of the purchase will be made in cash with the other half coming in the form of common shares.

"We thought about holding out for more, but then we recounted the zeroes in the number and decided to take the offer," said Tyson Madliger, CEO of Dealer Authority. "There's really no need to be greedy at this point."

Dealertrack finished last year with another blockbuster deal, buying Dealer.com for around the same price. Their hope is that this latest acquisition will add another element to their impressive digital marketing repertoire.

Some in the industry are skeptical. With the news being released on April 1st, it's possible that it's all just an April Fool's Day joke. After all, who would expect Dealer Authority to sell for so little?

I get it. I understand the need for more content to serve to an ever-growing flow of content consumers. The art of recycling content is important, particularly on sites like Twitter where a piece of content can and should be used multiple times in order to get the message out to everyone. It's a chronological feed, after all, and posting it once will only get it seen by an extremely small portion of your audience.

With that said, it's getting out of hand. I have been finding posts that are months old and no longer relevant hitting my feed from car dealers around the country. There's a limit. Old news is old news. In the case of the Tweet above, the article posted on Twitter by a Toyota dealer on March 30, 2014, is a link to an article from July 4, 2013. That's too long for this type of news.

When recycling posts on Twitter, here are some things to keep in mind:

• Is it relevant? Old posts are find if there's context that makes it work today. For example, posting an article about Tesla's early days in trying to launch with dealerships would make sense to post considering their current stance.
• Is it timeless? Some posts, particularly advice posts that give the reader information they can use today, can be posted up until the point that they're obsolete. An example of this would be a video that demonstrates how to change the batteries in a key fob. Until they change the way you open the key fob, it still makes sense to post for months, even years after the original.
• Is it nostalgic? There are times when old posts are even better than new ones. A picture of an old Honda ad from the 70s would play well to show how far the company has come over the years.
• Has it been posted very recently? This is one of my biggest pet peeves. If a post comes through today that is just a different wording on something posted yesterday, than it's not acceptable. The exception: timely events. If you have a big sale or charity event this weekend, then posting a different variation of the same thing over and over again is acceptable and demonstrates focus on the event.

As more companies use content libraries to keep the feeds flowing, it's important to keep in mind that the libraries must be refreshed. They must be pruned. In the case of the post above, it's simply not acceptable. That was news for about a month. There is plenty of content out there in the form of current news about every manufacturer and the local area. Don't get stuck beating a dead horse with your posts.

There has been a question that has popped up over the years ever since the rise of the internet as a valid marketing venue for car dealers. Should dealerships and vendors teach automotive industry people about marketing or should they teach marketing professionals about the car business?

I've seen both concepts work and I've seen them both fail. The answer always comes down to the individual; marketing people like Brian Pasch have been successful learning about the car business and car people like Jim Ziegler have been successful learning about marketing. However, there are some general traits that can be examined from both perspectives that should help vendors as well as dealerships themselves make decisions based upon their own strengths within the company.

For example, when I first came over to TK Carsites in 2007, there were very few car people. There were marketing geniuses throughout the company but very few had ever worked at a dealership itself. Rick Chavoustie, Joe Turner, and I were the first batch of car people to come over to the company and while I won't attribute those moves solely to the tremendous growth the company experienced over the following year, I can say with a certainty that it helped.

If you look at hot website companies like DealerOn, DealerEProcess, and Dealer Inspire, you'll see a similar trend of "car people" leading the charge for them. It's clear that they understand the car business from more than just the vendor side.

Conversely, I've seen some extremely successful digital marketing professionals make the transition over to the dealer side and find success. A conversation I had today with Joe Ventura from Better AutoMall revealed an incredible amount of insight from a person who has been in the car business for 9 months. He noted that data drove his purchasing much more than intuition or gut feelings that often drive experienced dealership inventory buyers. The results have been clear for his bottom line.

For us, it seems like a healthy balance is the answer. We are hiring like crazy lately and it seems to be split down the middle - the car people we've hired and trained in the art of marketing have been as effective as the marketing people we hire and train about automotive. We have the luxury of having the same type of split at the top; I spent a decade on the retail side while my partner has been on the vendor side for 17 years. The balance has translated into us making strong decisions and taking care of our clients appropriately.

At the end of the day, it's still about the individual, but a best practice for both dealers and vendors would be to achieve as much balance as possible for the sake of perspective. Car people see things through the lens of experience while marketing people bring fresh ideas to the table. Put the two together and you should have a recipe for incredible success.

Originally posted on LinkedIn.

For the last couple of years, the act of driving more people to vehicle details pages has been a focus for many dealers and marketing companies. From PPC to SEO, social media to website plugins, technologies within the automotive vendor world has been in a constant shift towards driving more traffic directly to the inventory.

The concept has been pretty universal but the data has been more obscure. Many of us "feel" as if VDP views are driving more business for dealers but a lot of the facts surrounding this shift have been a bit hazy. Form submissions are dropping for many. Phone calls and chats are often relatively flat, growing for some, dropping for others, but definitely not increasing at the same levels as the traffic on most websites that we've analyzed. That's not a universal statement - there are plenty out there who are seeing more form submissions, phone calls, and chats - but in general dealerships are getting fewer tangible leads while seeing an increase in overall sales.

There has been a lot of buzz around the automotive industry about Lotlinx lately. A lot of industry people and vendor partners (including us) have been touting the service for a while and it's been getting traction. This is not a sales pitch for that or any other product, but it's a focus on the eye-opener that compelled us to focus our efforts on VDPs through them and other marketing efforts.

When more people look at cars in inventory, sales seem to increase. Leads aren't increasing at the same pace. Does this mean that the shift towards VDP marketing is coinciding with a shift by consumers to find vehicles online and just drive in and see them?

I'd love to hear from others on this. We are putting a large portion of our efforts for clients on getting more people to the inventory more quickly and it seems to be working, but there's a gap in tangible data. What have you heard or seem about this trend? Is it possible that the old sales pitch used by AutoTrader and Cars.com reps when dealers ask to see real results actually gaining credibility?

Are VDP views enough to drive more business while people bypass the lead process?

There's a disturbing trend I'm seeing in the automotive industry when I visit websites. Perhaps it's been like this for a while and I simply took my eye off the chat ball. When I see chat windows that instantly prompt for the customer's contact information, it makes me cry a little inside.

This isn't what chat is supposed to be about. I'd love to have that debate with anyone. Chat is an alternative means of instant information. In other words, it's more akin to phone calls than to anything else. If you believe in having a barrier of entry for your customers to chat, then you should have your receptionist answer the phone with, "Thank you for calling XYZ Motors. Can I have your name, phone number, and email address, please? No? Okay, thank you for calling."

Click.

I totally understand how this came about. Chat companies were pressured to generate leads and that became the only goal. If you, as a car dealer, believe this, then I would contend that you've either been misled or you've lost touch with what chat should really do. There are two parts: lead generation AND customer service. Some people call the dealership to find out when the parts department closes. You don't need their contact information in order to tell them a time over the phone just as you should not require their contact information to give them the time over chat.

Whether you believe it or not, here's a fact that common sense should tell you: you're making some of your website visitors unhappy by creating a barrier to inquiry. Some people (more than we all want to admit) will never give their contact information before coming in. Unless your leads have a 100% appointment ratio, a 100% show ratio, and your lead volume is at 90% of your total traffic to the dealership itself, this fact should be clear. Despite what the up-log says, your customers are not driving by randomly. They went online. They've probably been to your website.

With that understanding, why would a dealership want to put a bad taste in their customers' mouths before they even decide to come by the dealership?

Serve your customers the information they want online without prejudice. Don't force them to fill out a lead form first. A skilled operator should be trained to work with people during chat, determine if they're a valid prospect, and gather the information the dealership wants DURING the chat process, not before. Will volume decrease? Maybe. Maybe not. I am no expert but I would imagine that the people who come into chat that wouldn't have entered because of the lead information wall will be more likely to leave their information as their questions are being answered.

You don't just want leads. You want good leads. You want great leads. Chat should be the best of both worlds, combining the dialogue potential of the phone with the information gathering of a lead form. If you make them fill out the form ahead of time, you're pushing away many who want to have a dialogue first. This is a big mistake.

Some would say, "If they're serious, they'll fill out the form, first." BS. There are plenty of serious buyers who want information but who have had bad experiences when they fill out lead forms. There's a reason lead form submissions are on the decline. People have been burnt in the past. Get them into a conversation first, then pursue the lead when appropriate. That's the right way to handle it.

To paraphrase Ronald Reagan, "Mr. Chat Provider - tear down this wall."

I was talking to an internet manager yesterday about their marketing when I brought up Hook Logic. His challenge was that he only gets credit for leads, so while he definitely wanted to help the dealership with our SEO and social media products, he wasn't crazy about the concept of increasing more showroom visitors that did not fill out lead forms or call ahead.

As we discussed Hook and other similar products, he wondered about my angle. What was I getting out of it to suggest a solution to his challenge? Was I affiliated with them? Did I get a kick back?

As a company, we form strategic relationships with those who we feel are the best at what they do. We know we (and every other vendor regardless of size) can only focus on and dominate a couple of arenas in the digital marketing world, so we like to partner with the best of the best. Sometimes, partnerships aren't practical, so we simply make recommendations of products and services we've heard about "on the street" in order to assist clients and even prospects.

That's how it should be. We have no affiliation at all with Hook Logic, but I've always appreciated what their product brings to the table. When the ISM brought up their challenge, I had no partnerships in place that could solve that specific problem.

Two things I've learned over the years as a vendor are that:

1. Everyone is fighting for the same share of the dealership's spend
2. Even indirect competitors are technically competitors if they're taking money that could be yours

When I formed our company, I threw both of those lessons out the window. Everyone should. From the vendor side, much of this industry has been built on kickbacks and relationships. This is the biggest reason that we're in the mess that we're in where the wrong vendors get more exposure than the right ones and the wrong products are forced onto dealers when the better ones are left in obscurity.

To the vendors of the world, please take note. There's plenty of business available for everyone. If you do what's best for the dealers even if it's not necessarily what's best for you, you'll still succeed and will have no problem sleeping at night.

To the dealers of the world, it's okay to question motivations. I am glad that I was called out by this ISM. I'm encouraged that they wondered what I was getting out of the recommendation. Sometimes, we recommend partners that we've selected because they're the best at what we do and we do have an incentive to make those recommendations. Sometimes, we recommend non-partner vendors, not because we have an affiliation but because we believe in their product. In both cases, we make those recommendations because we believe wholeheartedly that it's what's best for the dealership.

If more in our industry did that, we wouldn't have so many bad products being pushed onto dealers for the wrong reasons.

/rant

It's easy for us to take the high road and call it abysmal to utilize the strategy demonstrated below. We would never do it to two dealers, let alone dozens. We also understand the need to make a solution scalable for the sake of profits as we have worked for companies that need to scale to serve hundreds or thousands of dealers. With that said, it is still atrocious and should stop immediately. This gives quality automotive social media marketing companies a bad name when they pull this sort of stuff.

When Brian West from @FusionZONE Automotive, Inc. showed this to me today, I begged him to let me expose it. He cordially allowed me and now I can't really say much about it without spewing more vitriol than I'm used to spewing. This isn't what automotive social media is supposed to be about.

The justification that I've heard for this type of activity is that nobody will like more than one dealership on Facebook. This is a naive statement, especially considering the rise of the pay-to-play social media model, the fact that they're posted at the same time, and sheer silliness of the question itself. Some of the stores for which the question was posted were in south Florida on a day when it was 75 degrees.

Social media is about creating a channel of communication between the dealership and local people. It's about posting relevant messages and exposing those messages to potential customers. It's about participating in the community that is comprised of the very people who can and should be buying cars. To auto-post using an automated, push-button strategy is absolutely worthless.

Here's the post itself. Looking at the dozens of dealers that posted this content led me to realize that this wasn't a mistake. It wasn't a one-off instance. Every piece of content is posted across the board.

This infuriates me. It isn't just lazy and ridiculous. It's sad that dealers are actually paying for this to happen. It doesn't have to be this way.